Randall Stutman – Giving Feedback, Followership, and Admired Leadership (EP.497)

24:34Again, they're taking your general feedback under consideration. Instead of saying, have some feedback for you, or can I offer you some advice, say, hey, I have a suggestion. I know very few people that would go, oh, I don't want your suggestion. Now, all of a sudden, my suggestion is you get to the meetings on time. Same exact message, except I've reduced resistance entirely. What I tell leaders all the time, Ted, is they need to get out of the feedback business and get in the recommendation and suggestion business. They're going to be able to give a lot more feedback a lot more often with a lot less resistance and defensiveness just by what they call it, by how they introduce it and frame it.

25:08I know very few people that if I said to you, I have some feedback for you, they'd go, I can't wait to hear your feedback. But if I say, hey, I've been thinking about this, I have a suggestion or recommendation, most people would go, if you have any level of credibility with me at all, what is it? They want it. They don't want your feedback, but they want your recommendations and suggestions. And when you frame things like that, you're somebody that as a leader can offer feedback all the time. You're always offering suggestions, always offering recommendations. Some leaders don't like that because their notion is recommendations.

25:38My feedback is stronger than recommendations. The truth is people can take it that way anyway. They don't have to yield to what you say because you come from power. Now, there are times where I only want you to get feedback. Performance reviews, things have gone tremendously off rail. We need to talk about feedback because I need to use my power and authority to convince you of the seriousness, the gravity of this, and beseech you to act on it. But that's not the case 99 % of the time. Get out of the feedback business, get in the recommendation suggestion business, you'll see that it changes everything.

26:13So simple. If you were taking that one level lower, you said that you could lower the status even more than that. How would you do that? Lower than that is observation. I don't give them feedback. I just make an observation. Most leaders aren't mature enough to do that because they can't stop from them saying and finishing what the observation means. With kids, with people that are highly resistant, people very sensitive, sometimes it only takes an observation. Hey, I saw you do this in the meeting. What does that mean? I don't know, just an observation. Give yourself your own feedback. I'm going to call out, what did I see?

26:45What did I observe? What do I think? I noticed that people respond poorly to you when you do this. Well, do you think I should not do that? I don't know, just an observation. Observation is even lower in power because it says, I'm not even taking a position. I'm simply going to call things out the way that I see them. By calling them out, there's implications. There's a reason that that matters and why I would call that and make that observation, but I don't discuss it. People that are good at observation, a lot of good spectacular teachers are wonderful at observation. A lot of great coaches.

27:18I've seen some wonderful ski instructors, mountain climbing instructors, pilot instructors. Some of them are just wonderful. They just simply throw out observations. You're sitting there going, what does that mean? You're giving yourself your own feedback over and over again. In that 1 % of the time where it calls for feedback, what are best practices or behaviors to give the feedback so it can be heard and taken in knowing that there will be this resistance? You always have the option to allow people to internalize their own feedback. There's nothing more powerful than I give my feedback to myself rather than you telling me.

27:55Too many leaders depend too much on telling people and delivering feedback in a more direct way. I'm not saying that that's wrong all the time, but the power is if I give myself my own feedback. Rather than say, well, what do you think? Just ask an open end question. How do you think you did? What do you think went well and didn't go well? You can do that. What I think is interesting, and my leaders generally do this, is they use a third party. What would your mother say about what you just did? It's not what I'm saying. It's what your mother would say. It's exactly what I would say too, but I'm going to ask you to answer my question by using a third party.

28:33How do you think the customer will respond when we do this? How do you think your colleagues took that meeting? What was their conclusion when they walked out of that room today? They're going to give you an answer, and that answer is their own feedback. They're going to tell you exactly what you would have said to them directly. Except they're going to generate it. It's going to come from them and they're going to go, okay, I got it. And they're going to internalize it. Internalized feedback is feedback that's going to get acted on, remembered, has real duration to it, and has a longer term impact.

29:04Anytime I can get you to give yourself your own feedback and choosing a third party is the easiest way to do it. There's always a user or a customer or a colleague or another parent or a friend, what do you think they would say? I don't have the objective view. I don't have the perfect view as to what they would say. Whatever you said, you're giving yourself your own feedback when you answer the question. That's tremendously powerful. And good leaders do it all the time. One of the ongoing challenges you see in the investment world is giving feedback to high performers. How have you found admired leaders deal with the person who's performing who might not be fitting the culture the way you want the culture to move forward?

29:45First of all, independent of admired leadership, let's think about best practice when it comes to feedback. There's two things I'd want you to think about in terms of that world. Number one is right after success, right after mission accomplished, right after tasks have been achieved, people are much more receptive to feedback. Why? Because they've just succeeded. They've got an armor to them because of their success, their effectiveness. They're much more sensitive right after defeat, right after mistake, right after inaccuracy. Yet that's when leaders want to give feedback. They want to give feedback right when the person doesn't want it, when they're going to be most resistant to it.

30:21You got to remember, there is not a lot of timing issues relative to feedback, best practice wise, but that's one of them. Right after success or effectiveness, you can get feedback pretty fast and people will absorb it and take it in and want to deal with it. After defeat or after a mistake, after error, you probably want to give some people some buffer. Give them some time to reflect and get them emotionally ready so that they're capable of dealing with that feedback as a result. Too many leaders correct people too fast. Too many leaders deal with mistakes too quickly. The whole point of feedback is to change behavior and improve performance.

30:56It isn't just for you to get it off your chest and have catharsis, that's a big mistake that most leaders make. Another big mistake that leaders make, there's a bias that almost everybody has across the whole world. You have it, I have it, everybody has it. And that is, we're generally more critical of people based on our own strengths. Whatever it is that we're good at, we're more critical about other people about it. Yet we know that there's lots of ways to get to the outcomes. It doesn't have to be our way. But if you're somebody that's really analytical, you'll be more critical of other people's smarts.

31:25If you're somebody that's really organized, you'll be very critical of people that aren't as organized. If you're somebody that's creative, you'll be critical of creative. You do this to your kids, you do it to your spouse, you do it to your team. You generally over-index and over-emphasize the things that you're best at, and that's what you generally get critical of people with. That's something you really got to fight. You got to fight the bias to go, I need to be more objective than that. I need to focus on the strengths, weaknesses that they have and the feedback they need, not reflection of me.

31:53The question you asked, which I think is fascinating, is I have somebody that has maybe a great performance, but they have a lousy attitude or in some way they're effective. It's quite common because people feel bigger than life in some of these organizations. The deal is you've got to keep up a cadence of feedback with those people. You can't save it up because the reason that people don't give feedback to those people is because they generate those results. because they're dependent on that outcome, because they don't want to turn those people off. What would happen if all of a sudden that person copped an attitude or they got disinfected and they left and went to another fund?

32:30So we generally hold it up. And even when we give it, we're so indirect and we walk such a delicate line. The result of that is people learn the shitty attitude I have. It's okay. As long as I perform, we reward all the wrong stuff. The answer is, hey, get in the suggestion feedback business, but in particular, I need an ongoing small issue. Let's talk about the smallest things. I don't have to deal with your attitude generally. Let's talk about how you engage with this person. Let's talk about how you're learning this. Let's talk about how you share that. You need an ongoing high cadence of feedback on the smallest issues over time.

33:07What you'll see is you'll slowly move people from negative to positive in terms of climate attitude, other kinds of affect. That's the key. If I save it up and I never give it to you and never really deliver the hard message, then I'm rewarding you for all the wrong stuff. I'm going to get more of it. That's how prima donnas become prima donnas. We're going to take a quick break in the action to tell you about Ridgeline. Imagine starting your day with reconciliation already done. No spreadsheets, no breaks to chase, no duct tape holding systems together. Ridgeline is the first front-to-back system of record built for investment managers.

33:47One platform, one real-time data set. Embedded AI. Investment firms are replacing a patchwork of isolated and data order management systems, accounting systems, reporting add-ons, and client tools with this fundamentally new operating model, automating complex workflows, scaling personalized client experiences, and unlocking the full value of AI. If this is the year your firm is ready to modernize operations and harness AI, you can learn more at ridgeline.ai. And now, back to the interview. You mentioned a couple times best practices as distinct from behaviors. What's the difference between the two?

34:30Best practice is more situational. It's context-specific. It may not be perfectly timeless or universal. An admired leadership behavior would have worked 100 years ago, would work in any industry, It doesn't matter about technology. It doesn't matter who you are, where I am, what cultures we come from. It's universal in that way. That's what makes them so powerful. That's why I'm trying to find admired leader behaviors all the time, because those are the ones that have the biggest impact and they're the most powerful in the hands of a crafty leader. Best practices exist all kinds of places, like holding your feedback bias at bay.

35:03A best practice like a suggestion instead of feedback itself. They're contextual. I don't always want to offer suggestion. I don't always want to offer recommendation. I do need to think about the context. What do you need to hear? When do you need to hear it? That's what makes them best practice. Whereas behaviors apply anytime. I can bake them into my style and in the way that I lead. They're never going to get me in trouble, and they're always going to have some level of influence that I want. They're rare. That's why they're so hard to find. I've been able to find 500 of them, probably 30 or 40 of them in feedback.

35:36What's an example of one of those admired leader behaviors in feedback? You ask people how questions, just like you ask them what and why and where questions all the time. How questions, when they come to feedback, changes things. Let me tell you why. A how question, if it's done and carries feedback, actually embeds the feedback inside the question. When I say to you, Ted, how are you going to upgrade the talent on your team? The feedback is that your team talent needs to be upgraded. But I don't say that. Instead, I simply ask a how question. The feedback is already embedded in the question itself.

36:10No resistance, no conversation. As soon as you start to answer, you subscribe to my feedback. Really sneaky. Now, imagine you say, well, Randall, my team's pretty good. I don't need to upgrade the talent. I'm going to make you own it anyway because it's my feedback. So I'm going to say, if we were to upgrade the talent on your team, how would we go about it? What would we look for? Because I want to carry that, but I want to carry it without any resistance. So now, listen, the most admired leaders don't only ask how questions, but they ask more how questions than you and I do when we give feedback.

36:42What they really do is they ask a how question and they collaborate with the other party to answer the question. It isn't a gotcha. They say things like, how are you going to repair that relationship with one of your colleagues? The person says, well, and they go, let's talk about it. They figure out a strategy or solution going forward. All the while, instead of sitting down and saying, hey, I need to give you some feedback. You got a rocky relationship with one of your colleagues. You go, well, it's not that rocky. And then we start to argue and get nowhere. how questions. They embed feedback inside them.

37:14When you study admired leaders, they use them all the time to carry feedback. They carry more feedback with how questions in order to reduce resistance and to stop people from arguing with them and instead engaging them and making them own the feedback. They make people accountable to their feedback instantaneously by using a how question instead. If we went back in time and we studied great leaders in the history of the universe, male and female, culture to culture, we'd find a lot more how questions than you think. Because instinctively, intuitively, or just that they learned it, they've learned that resistance is their enemy with feedback.

37:52Defensiveness is their enemy in feedback. Arguing over the reality of the facts and that's happened in the past, enemy of change. How do I get past all that? Ask my feedback, let it get carried with a how. How about one more? There's something that I call an echo question. An echo question is a question that I would ask that has no right answer. It's not a rhetorical question, but I want you to think about it and I'm going to think about it. I say to you, you're up for promotion this year. There's pluses and there's minuses. There's people that will advocate for you and people that probably would want other people to be promoted over you.

38:25I want you to think about the reasons that you have for being promoted and the things that are in your way. You think about it, I'll think about it, let's talk next week about it. In that week that transpires, that question will echo in your head. You'll first think, why did Randall ask me that? Second thing is, what's my answer? Third thing is, what's his answer? You will eventually land so that when we sit down and talk about it, you will have given yourself almost all the feedback that I would want. You'll say, well, here are the pluses and here are the minuses, and I can see any gap between how you see it and I see it.

38:55It's so fascinating because you prepared yourself with my feedback, and I never gave you any yet. You're already half the way they are, maybe all the way they are. When you study admired leaders, they always have an echo question going on with somebody about something. I don't mean that they're asking the same person over and over again an echo question, but they're always asking people, hey, you think about this, I'm going to think about this question, let's explore our answers. If it's going to create anxiety, they might talk about that afternoon. They don't let people be anxious all weekend.

39:23What they'll do is they'll say, what's the feedback that you really need? Is there an echo question, then I might be able to get you thinking about it. Criteria success, rewards, punishments, promotions, hiring, selection, people's reactions and responses, all right for echo questions. Echo questions are really cool. Imagine sitting down with your child and saying, hey, I want to talk about how things are going on your team, how the coaches are thinking of you in terms of your skill and your attitude, as well as your friends and your teammates are engaging, or I want you to think about what are your big assets?

40:00What are the things that you're really bringing to this team? And what are the things that you could work on? I haven't thought about it completely. I want you to think about it. Let's talk about it tomorrow. Now, first thing that'll happen is your son, daughter, colleague, teammate will go, let's talk about it right now. You go, no, I want to think about it. I don't have clarity yet. What you don't say out loud is I want this question to echo. Okay? I need it to echo in your head. By the time we show up and talk about it tomorrow, you'll have generated all kinds of thoughts and energy and activity and you'll have your own feedback most of which i'll agree with occasionally i need to push something and then when i whatever i push will be directly the gap between how you see it and how i see it so cool echo questions unknown i'm in the literature very common with admired leaders and feedback every time you mention a behavior or best practice it feels totally intuitive i'm curious if there are behaviors or best practices that you found that are counterintuitive?

40:56Oh, there's quite a few counterintuitive behaviors. Lots of them. Once we articulate them, most of them are pretty obvious. You've been around how questions your whole life. Carrying feedback with them, that's a wholly different thing. Now that I've said to you that how questions embed feedback inside them, it makes perfect sense. It's a fact. There are some behaviors that are somewhat counterintuitive. Let me give you one. When you think about high performing teams, they operate differently in terms of their relationship with the leader. There's an old idea around matrix, a two-by-two grid that says, the relationship I have with my leader is about my relational closeness with the leader.

41:31How close am I? Do they know me? Do they care about me? Do they understand me? At the top of that matrix is the notion of expectation standard focus on details. Most high results leaders are more focused on standards than they are focused on relational closeness. But we know that high-performing teams require both. The highest performing teams are the ones where the leaders have really high standards, really high expectations, unusual focus on certain kinds of details, and people feel relational closeness. Problem is, most of the people that are really high-standard leaders don't like to be relationally close.

42:05They're not warm and fuzzy people. They're not very empathetic. People that are empathetic generally don't have high standards. They generally don't have the attention to details, which is why so many teams underperform or get inconsistent or the team members get defensive over time. They'll get defensive because the leader has high expectations, but they won't have relational closeness. They won't feel as if they're cared about. Then the opposite occurs. I know my leader cares about me, but they don't stand for much. They don't push me hard. They don't challenge me. You would think that the normal pathway is I got to teach people how to be more empathetic, warm, and fuzzy.

42:38But in my experiences, most people that are high energy, high charging, results-based leaders, they're incapable of being warm and empathetic and fuzzy. But there's a different pathway. That is, you can understand people more deeply in order to create the same relational closeness. I can invest in understanding the experiences that have made you up as a human being, has got you to be where I can understand your judgments, your decisions, the quality of your decisions over time. I can understand geographically what's important to you? Where do you find solace? Where do you vacation? I can understand what bothers you, what makes you happy.

43:10I can understand your talents and skills. I can understand your passions. I can understand your kids' passions. I can invest in you. You show me a leader that you think has got fabulous team results and you say, this person's grumpy. This person is not anything warm and fuzzy. I'll show you somebody that has found the counterintuitive pathway. They've learned to create relational closeness without empathy. They've learned to create it without being warm and fuzzy and giving people a lot of couch time. What they've done is they've invest deeply in those people and understanding them. They keep notes and they continually build a book of understanding about those people.

43:44Those people say, that person is invested in understanding me. They get me. I feel relationally close. They can have as high standards as they want. That's counterintuitive to me. I would have never imagined that. You show me a coach like Bill Belichick or Nick Saban or Pat Summitt, these people with high expectations, you go, these are not warm and friendly people. I will show you every time. Nick Samet invested tremendously in terms of understanding. Talked to every coach that you ever played for, if you played for him. Looked at every piece of game film. Knew physically everything about you.

44:17Could tell you the width of your palm. Wow. You're going to invest in me like that? You care about me in a different way? Belichick, famous for knowing your kids, the sports your kids play, the positions of the sports your kids play. And he goes out of his way to talk to those coaches that coach your kids. This guy cares about me, even though he's a grumpy guy. Every high-performing team leader has a combination of those two things. How do they create relational closeness? How do they have high expectations and standards? It's not intuitive, but there's a second pathway to relational closeness that's not intuitive to me.

44:53And that is deep understanding. On the margin, how important is tone? Tone is style, and style is the way that you express yourself. And you can express yourself positively or negatively. We generally overemphasize athletic coaches because it's something we all know, and they're out there in the marketplace. They don't have a lot in common with most corporate leaders. We don't get fiery halftime talks. We can't kick people off our team instantaneously, bring somebody new in. We don't have two-hour games. There's so many things. Most athletic coaches can have a bigger range of tone and style than you and I can as team leaders.

45:30We need to have a more positive, it doesn't have to be warm, but more engaging, more validating style to the way that we engage people. You can have a fairly negative style without recognizing it. Example, where do you start when you start talking with people? Do you start on the negative or do you start on the positive? That's a trained thing, by the way. You weren't born that way. Most smart people start on the negative because it's a differentiator, because it illustrates differentiation and distinction, as well as it illustrates, at least in most people's mind, that you understand something at a deeper level.

46:02What you normally do is go right to the negative, but there's not an optimism in that. Have you trained yourself to start positive or do you start yourself on the negative? What you're going to find is that's a tone. It sets a tone. It sets a climate. Most leaders don't realize that that's the case. They don't realize they're doing it. When they start giving feedback, they immediately go for the criticism. And then they go, oh, I feel bad about this. And then they end with some weak throwaway positive where people that have a better tone will say, I need to emphasize the positive, not just to make you feel better, but just to be objective and to set the right tone so you're ready to hear my negative feedback.

46:37Tone matters. I think of it as more of a style and approach. It's got to affect. It's either positive or negative. And I can get there in lots of different ways. I want to circle back to something you started talking about at the beginning, which is followership. You hear about that word and it creates energy. It's exciting to the thought of a leader that you just want to follow anywhere. How have you gone about teasing out what creates that followership? It's mostly a function of the way you motivate and inspire people and build relationships. If I find a followership leader that doesn't have results, I can still learn a lot of stuff from them.

47:10Not as much as I would from an admired leader, but pretty cool. When I talk to people around you who you lead, how do they feel about your relationship? Do they feel as if you're adding value to them? Do they feel if there's a high frequency of contact? Do they feel that the investment you're making is significant? Do they feel that you're making them better and challenge them in that way? High talent wants that. The relationship piece is a big deal relative to followership, but so is motivation and inspiration. Do I want you to succeed? Am I showing you that I'm rooting for your success? Would I do anything for you to succeed or do I put hurdles up in front of you to make you earn my trust, earn my respect, earn my desire?

47:51Followership is more an orientation that we have toward people. Good followership leaders tend to be high fans of other people. They tend to be relationally close to other people. But in particular, they tend to invest in other people in a multitude of ways. And that builds a sense of loyalty and a connection that they get to enjoy the benefits or the fruits of. When a leader's tasked with whatever the objective is of the company they're running, investment firm they're running, and you have all these other things to be relationally close to the people to create that followership, all the ways of giving feedback, how do people go about managing their time?

48:30Leadership takes a lot of time if you're going to be any good at it. I'd argue that you need to organize yourself more about relationships and conversations than about tasks. That too many leaders think about tasks. And by the way, that's a perfectly acceptable majority of the world does that. But if you're going to be good at this leadership thing, you need to organize yourself around what are the conversations I want to have today? What are the relationships I want to touch and engage today? That's going to have more long-term impact for you than anything else. Time is always going to be a problem because that takes time away from getting things done.

49:00But so does a lot of other things. For example, some people are so overscheduled, they've never had unstructured time to think freely and let decisions and strategy and other things bake. They make poor quality decisions as a result. That's a function of time, too. We can think we're wasting time when I'm choosing to walk to the office, when in fact, instead I'm choosing to walk and think about my decisions walking to the office without an interruption, doing some deep work around that decision. Time for you and me is always the challenge. How do we spend it? It isn't that I don't have enough of it or I have too much of it.

49:35It's how do I spend it? When I think about time and I think about coaching leaders is, I don't care what you value, but is there a time value congruency? If you tell me your family is important, I want to be able to look at your field of time and how you spend it and know that you're spending a good portion of your time with your family. Because if you're not, then that value is nonsense. In case good leaders have time value congruence, they schedule their priorities rather than let their priorities schedule them. You raise the ultimate problem, which we all face, which is we have to decide how we spend our time.

50:06And there's nobody that's telling us it's perfectly right. And we're going to see short and long-term benefits or effects of those choices. We can be really bad at them or really good at them. A lot of things that look like they're productive and effective right now are probably bad choices at time. As you've thought about scaling your time from being private with your clients for many years to six years ago when we talked, you were launching admiredleadership.com and started writing field notes. What's been the impact of those first two initiatives? I do nothing but sit around and write every day.

50:40It's crazy. It's no simple task writing. Even a short little email every day that hopefully is articulate and makes sense, especially as a best practice. I spend an enormous amount of my time writing now where I never did before. I spend most of my time talking before. I'm writing every day, which makes it easier because you get more fluid. I've had a couple of days where I go, oh, crap. I get no field note for tomorrow and I'm not in the mood. But that doesn't happen very often. And it's back to this notion of have to versus get to. I constantly remind myself, I get to write these films. I get to have hundreds of thousands of people read my stuff.

51:15I get to coach wonderfully successful people, people that need me to get to the next spot where they're trying to get to. I get to do those things. I don't have to. I'm still fairly private. This is the first podcast I've given in five, six years. I gave a bunch when we first started doing all this because I had to. I'm really a big fan of yours, so I'm happy to do this one. but it's not something I'm lining up to do. I spend most of my time coaching and talking to my clients, perspective as well as real, and talking to people because I have literally hundreds of people that are former clients of mine that I worked with for years.

51:49There's no reason for me to maintain the same level of cadence, but they still call me looking for a sounding board and advice and counsel. So I'm constantly engaged. I'm probably busier now than I've ever been. How's the uptake been on the website? Really good. Both FieldNote Readership, Alex Accept, Alex Use, our base platform, admiredleadership.com, and that platform, that playbook that's in there with behaviors, all of it continues to grow and expand and all go organically. We chug along with revenue to continually invest in growing the place, and it's been growing very nicely and has since inception 40 years ago.

52:27If you were giving advice to a chief investment officer head of an investment firm about one behavior you think they should consciously practice over the next couple of weeks. Curious what comes to the top of your mind. When I think of a chief investment officer, I merely think of decision-making. I think of somebody that's making critical decisions over and over and over again. If there's one thing that I would want a chief investment officer to do is to separate decision process from decision outcome. Those are different things. You don't control the outcome perfectly. In many cases, you don't control the outcome much at all.

53:01You always control the process. The idea of being able to make for a great process, knowing the difference between one and two-way decisions, that is one-way decisions, I can't revoke that easily, going to cost a lot of money or time and energy. Two-way decisions, I can revoke that if I need to. I need different processes for those things. In order to create a robust and vigorous process for those one-way decisions especially, Here's the key, to reward the process, not the outcome. We get to lots of investment outcomes by luck. Bashir market things that happened that we had no control over, and you celebrate, and you go, what are you celebrating?

53:35Because we celebrate luck. We don't say that. We're celebrating skill. We wouldn't have even thought of it, but that's not the case. Start celebrating decision processes that are great processes that produce bad outcomes. What you're going to find is you make for people willing to take more risk, willing to invest their time and energy, hone in and be specific with the process, long-term, they will make better quality decisions. Why? Because you're focused on the quality of the process. The outcomes are what they are. Good leaders always celebrate and reward process, even when outcomes are not great.

54:09The best leaders will do that on purpose. They will go out of their way to say, wonderful process. Everybody around the room will be scratching their head going, but it didn't turn out well. And you go, you bet. But if we did it 10 more times, it would turn out great eight times. That's something we don't control. We control this all the time. Figure out your decision process, especially one-way decisions, codify it and make it consistent and reward and celebrate anybody that does it with rigor. That will create better long-term decisions throughout your whole organization. In the work you do outside of investing, in sports, coaching, other businesses, I would love to hear your favorite story of something that might not cross over at all, just something that's come up that you find yourself repeating over and over.

54:55I coach college golf teams and college golfers for fun. I played in college, and I get back to the game, and I wish I could still play it at a high level, but I can't. I love working with the kids that want to work on the mental side of things. I don't mess with anybody's swings. You know, it never occurred to me the impact that parents have on these kids, because my parents were divorced from my playing. They didn't watch me or anything else. I developed on my own. But some of these parents are so vested in their kids. One of my favorite stories is I have one of the teams I worked with and one of the players is what I call a social performer.

55:27And he's particularly for his parents. His parents follow him on every hole. If he makes a birdie, looks at his dad, looks at his mom, smiles. You can't play high-level golf that way. You got to play for yourself. You can't be distracted like that. You can't be a social performer. or otherwise, as soon as he started with excuses and all kinds of weird stuff. He's quite good, even though he does that. He's as good as he's going to get like that. Turns out that team goes to Hawaii on a tournament, and because of travel, staff, foods, and everything else, parents can't go. It's the best tournament he ever plays, the best rounds he's ever had, because his parents aren't there.

56:01He's able to create the hyper-focus that he needs. The coach is thinking, wow, this is amazing. So he sits down, and he talks to the parents, and he says, hey your son performed unbelievably he didn't have you there he wasn't looking for your approval or anything else he said we know we can't believe we missed his best tournament we're never going to miss another one we'll never ever miss another one they totally missed it they showed up every time after that and he went right back to where he was it's funny how those things work sometimes people just don't get it that's such a fun story for me because i always wonder what am i not getting?

56:37Where am I showing up where I go, you bet, then I'm going to double down. I should not just be doubling down. I should actually be removing myself from the situation. So that's a fun one for me. Randall, I want to ask you a couple of fun closing questions. Before we get to the closing questions, I want to tell you about one of our strategic investments. We've made a few and each are working on a product or service we think will be valuable to our community. One is Oldwell Labs or OWL. OWL is the very best software I've seen for allocators to find and track managers. And I've seen a lot of them.

57:11Trust me, it'll be worth the look. There's a link in the show notes so you can learn more. And here are those closing questions. What was your first paid job and what'd you learn from it? My first paid job, I picked up golf balls on a driving range. I have to tell you this story because this driving range, they had a golf club that had been sawed off at the bottom and they had nailed on it a tomato paste can. You could scoop up a ball, put it in the can, then put it in a basket. I'd carry around this basket. And when I filled up all the basket, I'd go in and dump it. And then I'd go out again and I got paid some small shekels to go out and collect these.

57:46But what was so fascinating about that was I wore a big board on my back because people could hit you with a golf ball out in the range. It was a very popular place. Of course, you first realize that people would aim for you. They would actually go after you. Every once in a while, somebody would hit me in the wrong spot right at the top of my back. It would be forceful enough if you were out 200 yards, it would knock you over. It was the first time in my life, Ted, I realized some people want to hurt you for fun. That never occurred to me before. I was always innocent. I was never fully trusting.

58:16When I learned that people will hurt you for fun, that changed my entire view of people and relationship. And they really do because you're de-invituated. They don't know. You're not a face. You're just out there with the board on your back. But man, some of them are really good. They would hit me a lot. What's one thing most people don't know about you that you find interesting? I'm not sure I'm that interesting. I am a first responder. I once was a part of Mounted Rescue in Southern Utah, where I spent a lot of time. If somebody got really lost and they couldn't find them, they would ask us to go out on our horses and go find them.

58:53So I'm well-trained in first aid. I'm well-trained in wilderness survival. Most people would never recognize that. But actually, you know what? I got a different one for you. Here's something you don't know. My undergraduate degree is in forest biology. I was a student of dendrology, mostly of silviculture, and that's how trees grow. Dendrology is the notion of identification of trees. You walk around with me any place, I tell you what every freaking tree is. And that always blows people's mind. They're like, what? What's the best advice you've ever received? One of the most impactful pieces of advice that I've ever gotten is not to treat books as sacred.

59:26By that, I mean, write in them. You don't have to read them. You don't have to finish them. You can start another one. Spend time with books. Spend time with articles rather than feel guilty. I was that person where if I started a book, it'd sit on my nightstand and be like, well, I didn't really get into that, but I got to finish it. I can't start another one. I had somebody that said, don't take yourself so seriously. Don't take books so seriously. There's something to be learned. Spend a little time. There are a conversation. Write in the margins. You're not going to be that famous. No one's going to ask you for your library collection and look at all your notes.

59:59Argue with them. Mark them up. Spend five minutes with them. If you don't like them, then put them on the shelf and then spend time with them again. That changed a lot of things. I can consume a lot of information, a lot of writing, and a lot of reading that way, where too many people treat reading as something they have to complete and something that represents them in some physical way. I treat books like they're candy. How's your life turned out differently from how you expected it to? Oh my gosh. My life is so different than I expected it to be. I expect to play professional golf at a high level.

1:00:32And if I hadn't gotten hurt, who knows? I was a damn good putter. I was decent and everything else. But once you lose a sports dream, you have to find something else. I happened to be interested in organizational influence, persuasion. I started studying that and it turned out great. I went from teacher to coach. At one point, our firm got big enough where I had to stop teaching and I was a professor for a long time. In that process, that was an identity shift. Now, when I look back, I go, it all worked out perfectly. Who knew I was preparing to create Alex, an AI coach? Who knew I was preparing myself to write a field note every day, but very different than I ever thought it was going to be.

1:01:06Getting hurt was the best blessing of my life. Had I stayed, I probably wouldn't have been that good if I had made it. I wouldn't have had as good of impact or wouldn't be able to influence people's lives the way that I do now. It turned out really well, but gosh, very different than I thought. All right, Randall, last one. If the next five years are a chapter in your life, what's that chapter about? It's the same chapter. Nothing's changing for me. I have a lot of people that say, you're going to retire. I always say, Frank Snotcher, did he hum for a couple of years and then he stopped singing?

1:01:36And by the way, the answer to that is he never stopped singing. You know why? Because he was a singer. I am an executive coach. I'm going to be coaching people for the rest of my life. I'll be coaching people probably at the last breath of my life, just like I'm guessing Frank Sinatra was thinking about a song he wanted to sing. It's who I've made myself to be. I don't have a next chapter. Do I think I'll travel some more? Maybe. Will I write some things I haven't written? Yeah, maybe. In essence, it's one continual chapter. I'm trying to get better. The gap between who I am and who I need to be is always bigger than I want it to be.

1:02:10At the end of the day, I'm going to do more of the same stuff and I expect the next chapter will be the same. There's not enough good leaders in the world, so I'm about spreading the message. Everybody needs to do better. Be the leader that other people need them to be. If we touch one or two people as far as that goes, then this is all worth it. Randall, so appreciate you sharing your system and always enjoy it. Oh, that's great. You're doing great at this stuff. I always enjoyed listening and I appreciate you taking the time and talking to me. Great. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the show.

1:02:42If you like what you heard, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com where you can access past shows, join our mailing list and sign up for premium content. Have a good one and see you next time.

1:02:56Randall Stutman:All opinions expressed by Ted and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of capital allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of capital allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions and securities discussed on this podcast.